The writer Juan Eduardo Zúñiga has been awarded with the National Prize of Spanish Literature 2016.

You are here: HomeNewsThe writer Juan Eduardo Zúñiga has been awarded with the National Prize of Spanish Literature 2016.

The Prize is awarded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport to distinguish the complete literary work of a Spanish author whose work is considered as an integral part of the today’s Spanish literature written in any of the official languages of Spain. It is endowed with 40,000 euros.

The jury has recognized Juan Eduardo Zúñiga for "a life dedicated to letters in which he has been a master both in the genre of the story, realistic and fantastic, as in the literary essay and translation". Juan Eduardo Zúñiga was born in Madrid. He studied Philosophy and Fine Arts and specialized in Slavic languages. In 1951 he published his first work, Total Useless, which was followed by Coral and Waters (1962) and Social Articles of Mariano José de Larra (1976).

He was a solid defender of the novel as a reconstruction of memory. In 1980 Long November of Madrid, a book of stories set during the civil war and its postwar period, recurrent themes in his impeccable later narrative. Galaxia Gutenberg collected in a Trilogy of Civil War (2011) the narrative of Juan Eduardo Zúñiga about the civil war, in texts revised by the author himself for this publication to which he wanted to incorporate two previously unpublished stories: Hot Day in July and Invention of the Hero.